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Given this a few listens, doesn't seem as good on the whole as Astrocoast but enjoying it, good fairly laid-back summer album anyhow. Demon Dance and Weird Shapes are ace. Looking forward to seeing them play Electrowerkz on Monday. Has anyone else heard it?

and i still couldn't tell you what the guy is called
so it's just not comparable to chris brown, the worldwide mass media coverage of what he did and the very vocal "fuck the haters" stance he then took.

so, given their relative personal media profiles, obviously the media reaction to their private lives in discussion of their music is different.

all that said, if i saw a review of chris brown's music that ignored his personal life and talked about the music itself, in a vacuum, i wouldn't act like something terrible had happened. does every john lennon review have to start "john lennon was a sadistic dick head, but let's talk about the music"? what does that achieve?

I mean, if a carpenter designed and made a table that looked really great, it would seem a bit ridiculous to discuss that with reference to the fact that said carpenter might be an utter cunt in his personal life.

Conversely a novelist (say) who was a known abuser might well be worth analysing in terms of their creation of female characters in their novels, in view of the evidence directly related to that coming from their personal life and informing their narrative works.

Singer for an indie-rock band's probably somewhere in the middle maybe?

Probably doesn't help that I like the person who wrote the review and the person slating him for not mentioning the domestic violence charges.

I also wonder about mentioning it: you should (I suppose) take a non-partisan stance, which in itself seems ridiculous, but if you take the stance of, "This is completely beyond the pale," if you go on to say, "but I love the record," I'm not sure what that says. I don't think society really knows what to do about art we think is good made by people we think are bad.

Out of interest, do reviews of Polanski's films always mention his rape charges? I'd guess many don't. Not that I am using that to justify not mentioning this, I'm pointing out what may be the highest profile example of someone in the arts having their past tacitly accepted because of the work they do.

because in the interview they were trying to ask him the difficult questions but didn't press him when he kept dancing around it and saying confusing things. he never actually denies anything in the police report but says stuff like "i never acted in anger" and then "i deeply regret everything that happened that night" and it just sounded like he was trying to apologize while also trying to imply some degree of innocence, didn't really sit well at all.

the review doesn't let him off the hook, but gives a fair score to the album at the same time. i like that, because it was pretty nauseating when every hack music writer felt the need to write an "edgy" moral-posturing review of chris brown's album.

though actually I realised I had read about it before, but failed to register it was somebody from Surfer Blood.

I dunno, you either write the whole review about it or what... slap on a disclaimer saying that you're not cool with it..? To a certain extent it strikes me as pretty self important to feel you have to address it, especially when my limited understanding of what went on suggests that blokey from Surfer Blood may not be entirely mentally well and had attempted to self-harm first.

I think ultimately if they're not glorifying assault or misogyny - which arguably Chris Brown is with his martyr complex - you have to say a reviewer is not obliged to deal with elements of their personal lives that are still shrouded in a degree of secrecy and uncertainty. It's a boring point to bring up, but obviously if we were really getting on our high horses we'd never listen to a note John Lennon played or sang again, but you know.

I think it's a bit far-fetched to say that the DiS review is tacitly endorsing domestic violence by not mentioning it, and I think that this case, and the way it has been treated by the accused, is very very different to that of Chris Brown.

It's much more similar to that of Martin Cranwell from the Shins, and although he was not as integral to the band as the guy from Surfer Blood is, Pitchfork, for example, didn't mention his situation at all in their review of Port Of Morrow (which given that he was fired from the band, but then still appeared on the album, might have warranted an aside): http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16390-port-of-morrow/

- "without hearing the other side of the story ... we'll never know completely what happened that night"

But he still feels comfortable condemning John Paul Pitts:

- "my first response ... was a swift and decisive "Fuck You." ... my feelings haven't changed that much"
- "plea and pass might be enough for the Florida courts where forgiveness is concerned ... I'm still not so sure"
- "I sincerely hope Pitts never lets himself forget it"

It seems perfectly normal to mention the incident as context, but if I was going to express my opinion, as this reviewer has, in a public forum in a professional capacity, I'd probably want to know all the facts before doing so. That the reviewer questions the outcome of the proceedings and suggests he'd be better placed to pass judgement than the court that dealt with the matter, makes him seem more condescending than judicious. I prefer the latter quality in a reviewer/critic/journalist/whatever.

I don’t want to be an apologist for domestic abuse, but my problem with the subject is that it is treated as a dichotomous issue: separated into black/white, good/bad, victim/perpetrator, rather than judged on a case by case basis. Is it always unacceptable? Yes. Is one offence always as reprehensible as the next? No.

So, yes, JP Pitts, was found guilty of domestic battery, but the sentencing suggests there were mitigating factors, which haven’t been publicly disclosed. If I remember correctly, the police report noted that he had injuries too (she had bitten him, I think?), so it could have been a mutually abusive relationship.

This is just speculation, but therein lies the problem with not knowing the full story: we are lead to fill in the gaps according to a (sometimes) simplistic understanding of domestic abuse.

Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, of course. However, I think, when your job is to review music, it’s a bit unprofessional to use that as a platform to air your opinion on a related domestic abuse offence, especially when you admit in the same breath that you don’t know the full story.

but i just got a bad vibe from the guy and i can relate to why the reviewer felt that way too. and really, he doesn't accuse pitts of anything specific in much the same way pitts doesn't deny anything specific. it could be seen as unprofessional but that depends on what you want out of somebody that writes album reviews - to not be malicious, sure, but between that and a clinical song by song descriptions, there's a lot of middle ground. i didn't see it as malicious, but that's me.

Kev the White Elephant Reviewer here. So... Surfer Blood. I spent a lot of time last night thinking about this, as well as not getting involved with a lot of silliness on Twitter - apart from to clarify that yes, I was aware of the background, that I made a conscious decision - rightly or wrongly - to not talk about what is clearly a grubby and murky business, and to state that I think album reviews should be about the music, not necessarily people's personal lives. In my opinion, that's what interviews are for. Maybe I take an approach to reviewing that's a little too New Criticism for some people's tastes. As I somewhat flippantly said, I also didn't mention Josh Homme's near death experience in my Like Clockwork review. I prefer to consider the music on its own merits as much as possible. Sometimes nasty people make good art. Should the art be dismissed because of this? Does it have anything less meaningful to add?

I'm not saying that context is irrelevant. Sometimes, context is all. It depends on the artist, the piece of art that they create, and the response from the listener. The context of this particular album did not play into how I responded to it as a piece of art. Personally, I didn't see the lyrical connections that others have. Maybe that's a failing on my part. Maybe I wasn't looking for something others were looking for. That's kinda the point - a review is not really anything more than one person's response to a piece of art. That's how I've always written my reviews, and always will.

On a very practical sense, my research into the case before the review suggested that the actual events are somewhat disputed. There was definitely some kind of incident between two people. What actually happened is up for debate. In fact, the first draft of the review included a reference to the case in the intro, which i cut because it sounded tawdry, exploitative and crowbarred in. It's a complex situation, and a throwaway line seemed to me to be a inappropriate response. Maybe I should have left it in regardless. I didn't. That's my call as a writer, and the only people who have any right to criticise me on that are Andrzej and Sean, as it's their nuts on the line when this stuff is published.

Do I ultimately regret not mentioning the case in the review? In the sense that it caused a lot of fuss - for at least an hour! - and that said furore seemed to imply I was some kind of apologist for domestic violence, which I'm not, I'd hasten to add. It's clearly a subject that's close to a lot of people's hearts, including Laura Snapes, and it was my intention to cause offence or umbrage by not mentioning it. So I do wish I'd referenced it, even in a throwaway fashion. But equally I'm not of the view that a 300-word web review of an album, written in my spare time from my job (which is as a business magazine editor and journalist, by the way) is necessarily the place for me to play moral arbiter about a situation I know very little about. And ultimately it didn't have any bearing on how I responded to the album, so in my view discussing the context would have been even more dishonest than disregarding it entirely. Nor do I believe that I have any 'ethical responsibility' in an album review whatsoever, except to be honest about my response to a piece of art created by a stranger.

But maybe I'm completely wrong this time. It's been known. Now, when's the next Lostprophets album out?

not of the singer's criminal history (rumoured or real). separating the music from the human is something that has to be done to keep perspective when writing about or appreciating music. dave grohl's a wonderful guy but his music is terrible. mark e smith's music is awesome but....well you get the point. pitchfork got it absolutely wrong, this fella ^ got it right.